Painting Enamels on Glass

today's a very exciting day i got this package through the post what's in the box it's a box of glass enamels enamels that i've been waiting for for ages i have been following um a glass ceramicist and colorist on facebook for a while who's been posting these amazing samples of his ruby reds and his magentas in in translucent enamels and i have been wanting to get hold of them for ages they're here and i'm going to go through the whole process of how to work with these enamels the whole topic of enamels and how to work with animals is a really big one it's one that you the community the creative community out there have been asking for for ages i'll be honest with you after 37 years of working in stained glass i've used enamels four or five times on different projects so it's not often i'm still a student at heart i'm still somebody who wants to learn and because i want to learn i've reached out to this fantastic worldwide creative community that we have to other glass artists who i know have worked with enamels collectively if we can share our experiences together we can all lift our understanding of how to work with these wonderful enamels which enable us to add extra color and extra depth and extra dimension to our creations so now today we can make this enamel tutorial video it's a voyage of discovery and we'll go on it together starting right now [Music] so let's get the show on the road by choosing a selection of enamels we're going to go with three suppliers here starting with our british supplier alexander's acronyms three lovely magenta red and purple enamels to work with and the second group of enamels we're going to test is the french range of debitus paints and stains this company make a tremendous range of vitreous paints which are great for conservation work as well as a range of enamels which we're going to try today so pele glass in the netherlands supply these enamel and silver stained firing temperature kits which provide us with a wonderful range of royce enamels and silver stains sample kit i'm very excited to try these because this is a wonderful collection of colors really quite a comprehensive range of colors available as we can see here [Music] so i'm going to go through each of these rash enamels i'm going to mix them with a little bit of rosh water-based paint medium and fire them in the kiln a gas kiln for about 15 minutes at 660 degrees centigrade [Music] so a good way of illustrating how enamels work is to use the traditional bird the victorian bird which we'll all be familiar with often they have a selection of colors in there so i've got a variety of birds that i'm going to use my enamels with so we're going to add a little bit of debitus paint to our and it is really quite gritty so we have to spend quite a few moments just working away through grinding this down and i'm going to use for the grinding this which is called a muller a glass muller these glass molars are really useful because they're quite heavy and they allow us to use a larger flatter area to to grits like a millstone isn't it where we can actually grind down the pigment rather than just using a palette knife which is grinding small areas of the pigment we can use this glass muller to just work our way around grinding the pigment down and i'm going to spend a few moments doing that so to this ground down dry mixture of grisaille paint i'm going to add a different medium rush oils now royce oils are very interesting because they behave like an oil and they're called an oil in actual fact they are a water-based painting medium and they are they behave a little bit like propylene glycol but there are some other ingredients in there as well and basically it allows us to work with the paint for a lot longer before it starts to dry out so when i bought my debitus range of paint paints uh several years ago now i bought quite a range of them i made these samples um just on small pieces of glass but i mix them with water so it's going to be interesting to see what changes there's going to be when i use the same paint but this time mixed with rush painting medium and i suspect it's going to be a lot smoother to blend and i think you can see already hopefully the camera is picking that up the streaks or the bristle marks that you get with water and a badger brush as opposed to this lovely graduated color from very pale to richer brown ready brown using exactly the same pigment but it's the different painting medium that's making a change i'm going to make a little well in the paint i'm going to use a clean pipette and add a little bit of oil painting medium to this mixture we just work the paint into the medium i'm just going to with a soft flat headed brush just add a little bit of water to this mixture to create more of a paint consistency so let's just add a little bit of detail here and we can then begin to badger that down with a badger regular badger brush let's just work our way through that [Music] so i'm going to turn the kiln on in a second and dry the paint medium out a little bit more so that i can then scratch it back and continue working on a smaller scale a more controlled scale with needles it's really nice medium to work with it's very very forgiving it allows you to push the paint around the paint goes where you want it to go it doesn't leave streaks it doesn't leave marks i would really encourage you to experiment with this rush painting medium if you get the opportunity because it allows you to work a lot longer and the paint doesn't dry out so bringing the wet paint back out the kiln that has dried i just had it at 50 degrees centigrade for about 20 minutes in the kiln and it's dried the painting medium out so we can now scratch it back i'm just going to use a small scrub brush such as this plus a little needle this is sort of a homemade device to scratch back and create a little bit more shading and modeling in the bird so let's get rid of the excess paint first of all and this paint comes off really really easily it's really lovely to work with it doesn't leave any kind of residues there is no added gum arabic in this mixture it's simply royce painting medium and water [Music] so now we have done our experiments with our various enamels um i've landed on two enamels that i particularly want to use with this bird the debitus blue number one which is mixed in a royce water-based paint medium canterbury red alexander's arcanum's canterbury red which i'm going to mix actually with water and gum arabic because i find the water and gum arabic mixture to be a slightly denser mixture than the roych paint medium mixture which is more translucent and oily and i want to get the density of color in the red area especially around the head of the bird so let's start by mixing up a little bit of our canterbury red spend a few moments just grinding it down it's already very nicely ground down it's extremely well ground down it's a little bit like talcum powder as i've said previously which is ideal really and of course when we paint our enamels onto the glass surface we're actually painting on the same surface as the vitreous paints so that's the internal surface rather than the back side of the glass the back side of the glass is reserved generally for yellow silver stain [Music] so here's our first um trial of enamels actually with painted work and immediately what is apparent is the um pink that i thought was going to be really really pale is actually really nice it's a really nice sort of baby pink and this pink here has come out really blotchy i'm not happy with this at all um this is the canterbury red with uh water and gum arabic and uh no it's just really you can see it's really dark and blotchy and too strong a color it was meant to be a pink but it's come out as this cranberry red too strong and even here this detail here is really quite strong so an important kind of takeaway from that is to really be subtle with the amount of enamels that go on to start with this blue is interesting it's actually worked out quite well i'm going to add to that and created a slightly denser areas here and i really like this dark blue area here that tends to work quite well and the area that i filled in with a little bit of more uh a canterbury red is really quite opaque so getting the weight of the pigment right is crucial i think so mixed results but interesting results nonetheless so i'm going to carry on and i'm going to add some more enamels to this um and just experiment a little more and develop them further [Music] so we've had a few experiments with our enamels with varying success we're going to draw some conclusions about what we found out i'm just going to add one final layer which is the yellow silver stain to spice up some of the existing colors obviously colors like the transparent blue if we add yellow silver stain behind we're going to get a nice green effect so i'm interested to see how that works we have a worldwide community of creative artists sharing their work on social media and have left links to the following artists anika van der meer a south african artist whom i interviewed on my youtube channel rita schimelfarb again an artist who i've interviewed on my youtube channel doing some amazing work with enamels are david defontes a californian based artist again doing some really exciting things check out all their work using the links below [Music] so we've come to the end of our experimental phase of working with enamels and what are our conclusions well let's start with the different types of enamels that we work with starting with debitus the debitious range of paints in enamels are fantastic for certain things i've had this range for a long time and i've used it for conservation work it's extremely good if you want to reproduce a medieval paint recipe or a victorian paint recipe which has a particular liver brown or a red tone to it the debitous range of vitreous paints is absolutely excellent where they fall down slightly is in their enamel range the enamels tend not to be as translucent and as transparent as i would like they're also extremely gritty they require a lot of grinding down acronyms ceramic colors are british ceramic supplier these enamels have been absolutely fantastic at the moment there are only three colors in the range but i found them to be a joy to work with they are really talcum powder soft they mix extremely well with water and gum arabic they also mix really well with the roych painting medium and applied to the glass give a beautiful intensity of color which is entirely transparent i will leave links in the description below where you can find all of these supplied enamels online royce or ruchet as our american friends call them these enamels have been absolutely fantastic i'm so impressed with this range the student kit of enamels that were supplied to me from pele glass were it was really fantastic really comprehensive range and they have been so easy to work with giving a beautiful translucent transparent effect so here are our final sample panels we're finished our experimentation with enamels for today i've added a little bit of yellow silver stain what's the takeaway what's the lessons we've learned on our journey together well one of the big lessons i've learned is that enamels are actually very powerful and we only need small amounts of them and it's better to build up the layers in small thin layers rather than trying to put on too much i made the mistake of putting too much red enamel on this piece to start with i did want an intensity of color but an actual fact i found it became slightly blotchy um i and it's still pretty blotchy i've added things like yellow silver stain to it which which livens up the whole kind of painting technique for this is quite gestural it's quite loose and free and open enamels are very strong and in very intense colors and you can actually apply a very thin wash of enamel onto the surface of the glass and still get great results this is a good example here this is a much paler pink i don't know if the camera is picking that up or not but basically and it was a very very thin layer of enamel which is this magenta pink enamel here which you can see goes to quite a strong color but i put on a very thin layer with some water-based medium this is a slightly thicker layer and you can see i think hopefully the difference between those two intensities of color this was just a complete mess in a way i was sort of experimenting and playing around i put enamels on the front surface i also experimented with putting some yellow silver stain on to see whether the yellow silver stain would actually penetrate through the enamel and it has to an extent but it's not as strong so really there's a lot of takeaways from this the main one i think is for me to carry on experimenting and again i would encourage you to also carry on experimenting the potential for using enamels is fantastic there's so much we can do there's so much extra we can bring to our painted pieces by using enamels and really this as i say has been a voyage of discovery and we've gone on it together and hopefully you've found it interesting and what a revelation the roych oil painting medium has been this water-based painting medium has been absolutely fantastic i generally paint with water and gum arabic or oils like clove oil and lavender oil but the roych painting medium has been absolutely brilliant and check out this video on yellow silver stain how to get great effects with using yellow silver stain thanks again for watching bye for now

Channel: Derek Hunt Artist

Views: 39,767

Keywords: derek hunt, derekhuntartist, glass painting, stained glass, craft courses, stained glass artist, painting tutorial, church art, public art, stained glass art, stained glass painting, silver stain, glass enamels, enamel painting on glass

Id: 2_73s-eL7HE

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022